Theodore J. Cicero

Theodore J. Cicero, PhD, professor of neuropharmacology in psychiatry, focuses his work primarily on prescription drug abuse. He has spent most of his career studying the effects of narcotics on hormones in the brain, and his research has uncovered sex differences in the effectiveness of pain-killing drugs. In studying the abuse potential of prescription drugs, Cicero’s team recently discovered that because a new formulation of the pain killer OxyContin makes it more difficult to snort or inject, many users have given up on the drug and switched to heroin instead. That study of more than 2,500 patients at 150 U.S. treatment centers is ongoing.